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As some of you already noticed, we got some new servers up in Australia and Japan, with two more in Texas and Brazil on the way.

Orange servers are online. Green ones are coming soon

Getting good ping in Australia has been underway for a long time, but we finally got it. We also have quite a few players from Brazil, so we’ll add a server there. There’s also a server on the way in Texas, which can provide good ping for California and Florida which currently don’t have the best connection.

We do our best to keep an eye on where servers are needed and put servers there. If you feel that we missed a spot, please let us know in the forum.

As part of our effort to pull back the curtains and show what happens behind the scenes I have asked Reto.Injection to explain a bit about what he is currently working on. And as you might have noticed in the last few Intelligence Bulletins, he is working on a new and much improved resource system.

The resource system handles resources – resources? I hear you ask! Yes! Resources. Resources are everything the game loads into the engine; characters, weapons, textures, vehicles, materials and so on. – Reto.Robotron3000

No, but seriously. It is not often that the backend tyrannosaur feels tiny, insignificant and overwhelmed by the scale of things. Usually it’s the rest of the world bowing before the unstoppable, world shaking, hamburger powered, sex machine might of the tyrannosaur.

Parts of developing a game like Heroes & Generals is making sure everything around the game runs as smoothly as possible as well, so today I cornered Reto.HansG or a quick look at how that part of the operation works. – Reto.Robotron3000

Today I will tell you about the backend design of the homepage system on heroesandgenerals.com.

I am currently working on updating our weather/light settings and will include these in the upcoming build “Felber”.

I am trying to get all parameters going, with among others – properly working “tone mapping” (adjusting light/darkness to simulate pupil expansion/contraction), so you should be able to adjust and see properly both inside dark rooms and outside in sunshine.

I’m currently working on getting OpenCL into our Retox engine – not the easiest task, since we need to be sure the you are able to run it even if you don’t have OpenCL installed.

But wait a minute, what is OpenCL? OpenCL is short for ‘Open Compute Language’, so it’s a language that can be compiled for a CPU, GPU, CELL or special extension unit at runtime. It will for instance make it possible for us to utilize the OpenCL for repacking textures from jpeg2000 to block compressed textures.

When you download the data-packages for Heroes & Generals, you download all textures in a compressed jpeg2000 format (in order to reduce the download size), but your graphics card needs the textures in another format (with a larger file size per texture). So we need to repack the textures from jpeg2000 to block compressed textures as a part of the installation process.

So, it’s another happy day in the land of the Backend Programming Tyrannosaurus. I’ve made peace with the sheep; We were just too different, I suppose, but I’ll miss the wool.

Anyhow, let’s talk about my other project, Y’know that game thing? We have servers! In fact we have lots of servers, that do different stuff, and I thought you might like to know what the hell that stuff is. Let’s have a look at a pretty picture, shall we?